Heidt and Solivan: Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0

Josiah Heidt, JD, and Jackeline Solivan, JD, both of the Cornell University eRulemaking Initiative, presented a poster entitled Regulation Room: Moving Towards Civic Participation 2.0, at dg.o 2012: 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, held 4-7 June 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park, USA.

Here is the abstract:

Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government’s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to alert and effectively engage new voices in rulemaking.

For the full text of the poster, please contact the authors.

Thanks to Mr. Heidt for allowing me to post the abstract.

Park, Vallbé, Cardie, et al. on Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking

Joonsuk Park of the Cornell University Department of Computer Science, Dr. Joan-Josep Vallbé of the Legal Information Institute at Cornell University, Professor Dr. Claire Cardie of the Cornell University Department of Computer Science, and colleagues, will present a paper entitled Facilitative Moderation for Online Participation in eRulemaking, at dg.o 2012: The International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 4-7 June 2012, at the University of Maryland, College Park, in College Park, Maryland, USA.

Here is the abstract:

This paper describes the use of facilitative moderation strategies in an online rulemaking public participation system. Rulemaking is one of the U.S. government’s most important policymaking methods. Although broad transparency and participation rights are part of its legal structure, significant barriers prevent effective engagement by many groups of interested citizens. Regulation Room, an experimental open-government partnership between academic researchers and government agencies, is a socio-technical participation system that uses multiple methods to lower potential barriers to broader participation. To encourage effective individual comments and productive group discussion in Regulation Room, we adapt strategies for facilitative human moderation originating from social science research in deliberative democracy and alternative dispute resolution for use in the demanding online participation setting of eRulemaking. We develop a moderation protocol, deploy it in “live” [U.S.] Department of Transportation (DOT) rulemakings, and provide an initial analysis of its use through a manual coding of all moderator interventions with respect to the protocol. We then investigate the feasibility of automating the moderation protocol: we employ annotated data from the coding project to train machine learning-based classifiers to identify places in the online discussion where human moderator intervention is required. Though the trained classifiers only marginally outperform the baseline, the improvement is statistically significant in spite of limited data and a very basic feature set, which is a promising result.

For the full text of the paper, click here.

Thanks to Dr. Vallbé for granting permission to post the abstract.

Gorham on State Courts, E-Filing, and Diffusion of Innovation

Ursula Gorham, JD, MLS, MPM, of the University of Maryland College of Information Studies, will present a paper entitled State Courts, E-Filing, and Diffusion of Innovation, at dg.o 2012: The 13th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 4-7 June 2012 at the University of Maryland, College Park, in College Park, Maryland, USA.

Here is the abstract:

Despite the widely touted benefits of electronic filing (“e-filing”), state courts continue to lag behind their federal counterparts and remain at various stages of evaluation, development, and implementation of e-filing systems. A number of reasons for lack of progress – e.g., concerns regarding privacy, limited funding, the judiciary’s lack of awareness of the benefits of e-filing – have been suggested. This paper, building upon these suggestions, proposes a framework of analysis based upon a theory of innovation and diffusion, seeking to identify those factors that contribute to state courts’ adoption of e-filing. The proposed framework of analysis is one avenue for exploring the underlying reasons for sluggish progress in this area, and this exploration will pave the way for a more comprehensive assessment of state courts’ current e-filing initiatives, the challenges that state courts face as they transition to e-filing, and the policies that can be adopted to overcome these challenges.

For the full text of the paper, please contact the author.

Thanks to Ms. Gorham for granting permission to post the abstract.

dg.o 2011 Paper: Examples of Specialized Legal Metadata Adapted to the Digital Environment, from The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations

Legal Information Institute Director Tom Bruce‘s and my new paper, entitled Examples of Specialized Legal Metadata Adapted to the Digital Environment, from the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (click here for slides) was presented on June 14, 2011, at dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Here is the abstract:

Among print-based U.S. legal information resources, specialized tools that link discrete types of metadata substantially improve the efficiency of legal research. Many of these tools could be of considerable utility in the electronic information environment. However, many such tools require thorough redesign in order to make them optimally usable by digital systems. This paper presents a case study of one such tool — the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations’ Parallel Table of Authorities and Rules (PTOA), which links each statute to its corresponding regulations. Through examples of XML and RDF/OWL markup, the paper shows how such a tool might be adapted successfully to the electronic domain.

The discussion following the presentation concerned XML specifications that might be used for the digital PTOA, use cases for the digital PTOA, and approaches to automating the adaptation of the PTOA for the digital environment, including automated text analysis techniques such as those used by Professor Dr. Kincho H. Law and Dr. Gloria T. Lau of Stanford University’s Engineering Informatics Group.

Legal Informatics Papers at dg.o 2011

Several legal informatics papers / posters will be presented at dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, being held 12-15 June 2011, at the University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, USA.

Here are the dg.o 2011 legal informatics papers / posters I’ve identified. Click here for the conference program. If you know of other dg.o 2011 legal informatics papers / posters, please feel free to identify them in the comments:

• Thomas R. Bruce and Robert Richards, Examples of Specialized Legal Metadata Adapted to the Digital Environment, from The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (click here for slides)
• Mark Deckert, Abram Stern and Warren Sack, System Demonstration: A Toolset for Web-based Peer Review of Scientific Testimony
• Julia Ekstrom, Gloria Lau, Matthew Hardy and Kincho Law, Application of the MINOE Regulatory Analysis Framework: Case Studies
• Siddharth Taduri, Gloria Lau, Kincho Law, Hang Yu and Jay Kesan, Developing an Ontology for the U.S. Patent System
• Siddharth Taduri, Gloria Lau, Kincho Law, Hang Yu and Jay Kesan, An Ontology-Based Interactive Tool to Search Documents in the U.S. Patent System

Call for Papers: dg.o 2011

A call for papers has been issued for dg.o 2011: The 12th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 12-15 June 2011, at the University of Maryland, in College Park, Maryland, USA. Here are the deadlines:

• 10 January 2011: Workshop, tutorial, and panel proposals due
• 6 February 2011: Papers, posters and demo descriptions due
• 30 March 2011: Camera-ready manuscripts due

Papers or proposals are invited on the following topics:

• “Digital Government Application Domains: such as courts, emergency response management, education, government statistics and data, grants administration, intelligence, international initiatives and cooperation, health and human services, law enforcement and criminal justice, legislative systems, natural resources management, open government (o-government), regulation and rulemaking, security, tax administration, transportation systems, and urban planning.
• IT-enabled Government Management and Operations: such as cross-boundary information sharing and integration, decision-making processes, digital government organization and management strategies, information assurance, information technology adoption and diffusion, IT and service architectures, long-term preservation and archiving of government information, program planning, service integration, as well as technology transition and transfer.
• Information Values and Policies: such as accessibility, digital democracy and governance, digital divide, openness, privacy, public participation in democratic processes, security, transparency, trust, and universal and equity of access to information and services.
• Information Technology and Tools to Support Government: such as cloud computing for digital government domains; collaboration tools; digital libraries and knowledge management; geographic information systems; human-computer interaction; intelligent agents; information integration; interoperable data, networks and architectures; large scale data and information acquisition and management; mobile government; multiple modalities and multimedia; national and international infrastructures for information and communication; service-oriented architectures; semantic web; and social networking, mashups, and software engineering for large-scale government projects.”

For more information, please see the call for papers.

Deckert, Stern, & Sack on Enabling Peer Review of Expert Testimony Within Government Proceedings

Mark Deckert, Abram Stern, and Professor Warren Sack, all of the University of California Santa Cruz, presented a poster entitled Enabling Peer Review of Expert Testimony Within Government Proceedings at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico. Here is the official citation:

Deckert, M., Stern, A., and Sack, W. 2010. Enabling peer review of expert testimony within government proceedings. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual international Digital Government Research Conference on Public Administration online: Challenges and Opportunities (Puebla, Mexico, May 17 – 20, 2010). dg.o. Digital Government Society of North America, 229-230.

Click here for the poster.

Click here for the paper accompanying the poster.

Click here for the presentation slides (less “official” than the poster and paper).

Click here for the text of the presentation (less “official” than the poster and paper).

Here is the abstract of the paper:

Having developed Metavid.org, a site that archives video footage of the U.S. Congressional proceedings, we build upon the platform to enable peer review of expert testimony within government proceedings. By extending Metavid coverage to the bimonthly meetings of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and leveraging open source software technologies for peer production, we demonstrate the potential for expert peers to vet or dispute technological and scientific information provided to government by offering citations and commentary in a web-based, collaborative environment.

Thanks to Mark Deckert for providing this information.

[This post was last updated 11 June 2010.]

Summary of Muhlberger dg.o 2010 Panel on Information Technology and Public Deliberation

Travis Kriplean of the University of Washington Department of Computer Science has posted a summary of Professor Peter Muhlberger’s panel entitled Information Technology and Public Deliberation: Research on Improving Public Input into Government, held at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico.

The panel included:

• Mr. Kriplean’s presentation on Reflect, a tool enabling users to add summaries to online comment boards;
• A presentation by Mark Deckert of the University of California Santa Cruz Department of Computer Science on using the Metavid Congressional video service as a platform enabling scientists to comment on others’ scientific testimony at Congressional hearings;
• A presentation by Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University College of Mass Communications about the Deliberative E-Rulemaking (DeER) project, and particularly about the technology used in the project and his team’s experience collaborating with government agencies to test that technology.

Marx et al. on Digital Sustainable Publication of Legacy Parliamentary Proceedings

Professor Dr. Maarten Marx and Anne Schuth, both of the Universiteit van Amsterdam Informatics Institute, and Nelleke Aders of Tweede Kamer der Staten-Generaal, will present a paper entitled Digital Sustainable Publication of Legacy Parliamentary Proceedings, at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico. Here is the abstract:

We address the problem of publishing parliamentary proceedings in a digital sustainable manner. We give an extensive requirements analysis, and based on that propose a uniform XML format. We evaluated our approach by collecting and automatically processing proceedings from six parliaments spanning almost 200 years in total. Most of this data is real legacy data consisting of scanned and OCRed documents. The approach scales very well and produces high quality data.

All documents are transformed into UTF-8 encoded XML files with extensive metadata in Dublin Core Standard. The text itself is divided into pages which are divided into paragraphs. Every document, page, and paragraph has a unique URN which resolves to a Web page. Every page element in the XML files is connected to a facsimile image of that page in PDF or JPEG format. We created a viewer in which both versions can be inspected simultaneously. A search engine for the complete collection is available online.

    

Muhlberger dg.o 2010 Panel on Information Technology and Public Deliberation

Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University Center of Communications Research has organized a panel entitled Information Technology and Public Deliberation: Research on Improving Public Input into Government, to be held at dg.o 2010: The 11th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research, to be held 17-20 May 2010 in Puebla, Mexico.

The panelists include:

• Professor Teresa M. Harrison of the University at Albany Department of Communication (discussant);
• Dr. Nick Webb of the University at Albany Institute for Informatics, Logics, and Security Studies, discussing DeER: the Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project;
• Professor Peter Muhlberger of the Texas Tech University Center of Communications Research, discussing DeER: the Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project;
• Professor Warren Sack of the University of California at Santa Cruz Film and Digital Media Department, discussing opinion processing technology and MetaVid;
• Travis Kriplean of the University of Washington Department of Computer Science and Engineering, discussing methods for enabling citizens to collaboratively synthesize their views on policy issues, with reference to Reflect.

Here is the abstract:

We propose a panel to examine research programs on the uses of information technology (IT) tools with public deliberation to enhance the value of public input into government. “Wicked” planning problems and intractable policy issues require novel solutions. Better public input can contribute to resolving such difficult issues. IT and deliberation have both been promoted as means of improving public input on difficult issues. These methods may help the public better understand the issues, motivate their involvement, develop better ideas for addressing the issues, and enhance the legitimacy of eventual policy decisions. A number of researchers are examining whether deliberation and IT in combination can be especially helpful. The panel will examine several such efforts and their research questions, methods, experiences, and results. The panel should help build synergies between research groups, disseminate novel approaches, and raise awareness of the strengths and potential pitfalls of research in this area.

For more information about the panel, please contact Professor Muhlberger.